Welcome to the home site of the Columbus OWASP Chapter. We welcome all technology professionals to our quarterly discussions of application security.

Upcoming Meetings

Summer 2013 meeting at Microsoft!

OWASP Columbus is meeting at the Microsoft office next Polaris on Thursday August 1st from 1 to 5. Brian Prince will be speaking, and the other speaker is TBA.

Fall 2013 meeting at Improving Enterprises

We'll be back at Improving (One Easton Circle - new address!) for the Fall meeting in October. There will be an RFP announced at the Summer meeting.

Chapter information

Our chapter meets quarterly; we're organizing several different event styles in addition to traditional presentations. There will be opportunities for Columbus OWASP members to meet other local security groups through event cross-participation and cooperation.

OWASP Membership

There have been a lot of questions about membership. Membership supports the many projects that OWASP in involved in, including ESAPI. Learn more about membership here. Remember to tell them you are interested in membership in the Columbus chapter.

Stay in touch with Columbus OWASP

The first stop to connecting with the community is our mailing list, feel free to contribute and interact with the list - it's not just for listening!

The professional association of OWASP Foundation Inc., is always free and open to anyone interested in learning more about application security.

We want your participation!

To submit educational topics for upcoming meetings, submit your ideas and slide deck (if available) using the OWASP Template and include a speaker BIO. It doesn't have to be formal, we're happy to provide some assistance in organizing your thoughts. You only need an interest and knowledge of your independent research or related software security topic.

Sponsorship, too!

There are myriad opportunities to sponsor the chapter, including meeting space, food, marketing, and monetary donations. We're always looking for assistance. Inquiries regarding chapter or per-meeting sponsorship opportunities can be directed to the chapter leaders. As a 501(3)c non-profit professional association your support and sponsorship of a meeting venue and/or refreshments is tax-deductible and all financial contributions can be made online right now: funds to OWASP earmarked for Columbus.

Previous Meetings

Here are the details on previous meetings, for historical record.

Winter 2013 meeting

Our Winter meeting will be March 7th at 1PM. We are meeting at OARnet, on Kinnear Road. NOT at Improving, who is moving offices. Hope to see all developers and security professionals there!

The first speaker will be Bill Sempf. He is speaking on Windows Store app security.

Security and privacy in mobile development has been a topic in the iOS and Android world for a few years now. Microsoft is entering the fray with be their first significant push into the mobile space. Will your apps be the next ones on the front page of Ars Technica (for the wrong reasons)? Bill would like to help you make sure that won’t happen. Learn the security considerations of HTML5, backend services, cloud computing and WinRT.

The second speaker will be Phil Grimes. He'll be speaking about CSRF, with the most awesome demo ever. Abstract is TBD, but I promise it is awesome.

UPDATE: Here is Phil's abstract!

In a discussion focused on Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF), explore the trust vulnerability and walk through a demonstration of the exploit in action. Understand how these attacks take place and what they look like from the perspective of both victim AND attacker. Walk away with a grasp on the security implications of this weakness as well as understanding why the attack is possible and what steps should be done to prevent it. This session is a 45 minute demo with a 15 minute Q&A after. It is an advanced technical session intended for technicians, engineers, and developers with interest in web application security.

Fall 2012

The fourth quarter OWASP meeting is almost upon us! We'll be meeting December 6th at 1PM at the wonderful offices of Improving Enterprises.

Jason Kent from Qualys and Jason Mongomery from AEP will be our speakers. We promise that it's the only security event in Ohio that day with two Jasons as speakers.

Thanks to Qualys for sponsoring lunch and Improving for providing the space and drinks. They are both awesome.

Summer 2012

The third quarterly meeting for the Columbus chapter of OWASP was held on September 13th at 1 in the afternoon, and featured two powerhouses from the national InfoSec stage. Jim Manico from White Hat security will be speaking on the Top 10 Web Defenses, and Brent Huston from Microsolved will be speaking on malware analysis. The meeting was at the Improving Enterprise Ohio office (4449 Easton Way, Suite 100, Columbus, OH 43219 614-573-7405). More info here. It was an awesome meetup, with our largest attendance to date.

Spring 2012

The second quarterly meeting for the Columbus chapter of OWASP was held on June 14 in the afternoon, and featured two speakers from the local infosec community. Jason Pubal from OCLC spoke on the topic of web application security - his presentation can be found here. Jerod Brennan from Jacadis spoke on defending mobile applications, and his presentation is available here.

Winter 2012

Our winter 2012 meeting was February 15th from 8 AM to noon at the J. Liu in Worthington. This was a joint meeting with ISSA, the first of many collaborations within the thriving Columbus security community for 2012. Here are the details:

Creating the Business Case, An Essential Guide for the Security Practitioner

All too often, legitimate and critically required security initiatives fail to reach fruition. Oftentimes, this is due to a lack of communication and understanding between the security practitioner and the business owners. Jack Jones, SR VP of IT Risk, Huntington Bank, will describe in detail how practitioners can achieve greater success by clearly linking an improved security posture to the success of the enterprise.

Jack Jones, SR VP of IT Risk – CISSP, CISA, CISM
09:25 – 10:20
Open Source Security Tools Your Team Is Not Using

The second a web application is published, your internal infrastructure is instantly exposed to vulnerabilities network-level protection can’t defend. Now that you’ve benefitted from our previous sessions information share of OWASP and the Top 10, we will dive into actual tactical mitigation tools available to help detect and mitigate the most common security vulnerabilities.

From WebGoat and WebScarab to VulnXML – OWASP has many free projects and web application security assessment tools, but which is right for your situation? The combination of Bill Sempf’s knowledge, Aaron Ansari’s practical application, tools and sample code (.NET) is just what you need to keep those hackers at bay.

At JPMorgan Chase Bank the challenge of balancing business flexibility and regulatory compliance is paramount. In the Retail lines of business: Consumer and Business Banking, Chase Mortgage Banking, Chase Auto Financing, and Chase Student Lending, as well as the supporting technology teams, compliance controls heavily leverage the Identity & Access Management processes and tools. The IAM team is charged with providing governance and monitoring of the banks access controls across nearly 1000 applications and thousands of infrastructure assets with 1.4M distinct levels of access for 2.1M non distinct users. The only viable solution to effectively manage this volume of data is broad integration, automation, and a strategic push to on board all assets to the IAM tool suite.

Kwame Fields – CISSP

Q4 Meeting December 1, 2011 at 1PM

On December 1, 2011, from 1PM to 4PM at the Conference Center of BMW Financial, the Columbus OWASP chapter presented it's Third Quarter Meeting.

Dan Houser was our first speaker. Dan is a Senior Security & Identity Architect for a Global 100 healthcare organization, based in Columbus, Ohio. In addition to providing Information Security Architecture and Risk Management subject matter expertise, he drives the organization's Identity and Access Management strategy. Mr. Houser is a published author, with primary research and many papers in security, holds the CISSP-ISSAP, CISM, CISA and CGEIT designations, and is an often sought after instructor and speaker.

Mark Feferman was our second speaker. Mark has over 18 years of IT security experience beginning as one of the original four software developers of the BindView suite of products. As a career software developer, who later became involved in IT security, Mark’s role as an application security professional is focused on strategic initiatives, like secure coding standards, threat modeling, and the integration of static code analysis into the SDLC. Mark currently services as the practice director for Application Security at FishNet Security. He, along with his 18 direct reports, located around the US, perform the advisory services for the practice.

Mark presented: Application Security…it’s not just a tactical effort…it’s both a Strategic and Tactical affair. This will include The State of Application Security: The Strategic, the Tactical, and the Do-Nothings, Consultant Perspectives: Application Security in the PCI World, and Secure SDLC, Where to Start, What are the essentials.

Q3 Meeting August 18, 2011 at 1PM

On August 18, 2011, from 1PM to 4PM at the Conference Center of BMW Financial. Two speakers were featured:

This presentation will discuss PHP and ASP malware, discovery techniques, how the attackers are staging and processing malware-based attacks, as well as the relevance of anti-virus against these forms of malware. Drawn from real world attacks and compromises, examples will be displayed and discussed. Take aways will include the architecture of attacker cells, their targeting and use of compromised hosts and insight into how simple, basic controls can assist us in fighting these forms of assault.

OWASP Enterprise Security API (ESAPI) is one of the flagship projects at OWASP, but as of yet, not many application development teams have adopted it. This presentation will provide a brief history and overview of ESAPI, including its goals and all its language implementations, before taking a deeper dive into ESAPI for Java.

The ESAPI for Java portion will discuss major changes from ESAPI 1.4 to ESAPI 2.0 and how the various ESAPI 2.0 security controls map as mitigations for the OWASP Top Ten. We will also examine the relative maturity of each security control.

This will be followed by a few examples of how to use ESAPI, including an in-depth one of using ESAPI's symmetric encryption. Finally, we will briefly describe how the OWASP AppSensor project
has the ESAPI's Intrustion Detection mechanism to provid an powerful intrustion detection system at the application layer and describe some of the advantanges of this versus an more
traditional IDS.

Q2 Meeting - June 10th, 1PM - Defensible .NET

ASP.NET and the .NET framework have become the preferred foundation underlying enterprise applications. While Microsoft has prioritized integrating security into the ASP.NET framework, attacks at the application layer are dramatically increasing. How effective are the security controls built into the ASP.NET framework? Application developers must understand the limitations of the framework and ensure their code is secure. Focusing on the OWASP top ten, Jason Montgomery will explain the latest defensive techniques specific to the ASP.NET environment. Jason is Sr. Security Specialist at Active Technologies Group, Inc. (ATGi). He is a SANS instructor in .NET application security and co-author of the secure coding certification, GSSP.NET. Jason has spent the past five years guiding software security practices at the Department of Defense, and currently leads ATGi’s secure software development and assessment practice.

3rd Annual Central Ohio Infosec Summit

The goal of this event is to educate regional Information Security professionals and support collaboration by bringing leading speakers in the information security field together to educate the community on the latest industry trends and issues.

This Information Security Conference will provide information security professionals with the most up-to-date information, tools, trends, legislative information, products, services, and strategies for addressing information security issues. The conference will focus on key topics related to information security with presentations provided by recognized experts and exhibits by some of the nation’s leading organizations.

2010 Q1 Meeting

Meeting Summary: PHP is a widely used, general-purpose scripting language, originally designed to produce dynamic web pages. In 2007, The PHP Group reported it was utilized on over 20 million websites and 1 million web servers. In 2008, the National Vulnerability Database claimed PHP accounted for 35% of software vulnerabilities, with nearly all caused by poor programming practices. Every PHP developer, hoster, and security professional should understand the primary attack vectors being used by attackers against PHP applications. During this OWASP meeting we dived deep into PHP security - specifically the OWASP Top 10 in the context of PHP.

In addition to the presentation, chapter leadership changes were announced as well as the new leadership's plans for increasing the visibility and participation of the chapter.